printing using custom inks

[ben_danger]

hi there! i am an illustrator in need of some technical assistance!

i produce small 'zines' using my inkjet printer at home. it is a cheap old colour hp (black cartridge and CMY cartridge). i only print using black to keep costs down, and as colour isnt a key part of my practice. the one thing that annoys me about this printer is that if i use up all my cyan, the remaining magenta and yellow goes in the bin. but today i had an idea....

would it be possible to:

mix my own inkjet inks, for a printer (preferably a b/w printer, and preferably A3, although A4 is fine.)

i would make 2 A4 images to print. one which is black outlines, one which is blocks of a single custom colour. i would print using a cartiridge filled with custom black, then put the paper back in to print with custom colour. it would be used to produce these results

Issue 1 of NOBROW magazine

it would basically be a poor mans lithograph studio.

i would like the random offsetting that would occur, so no need to worry about that.

could someone suggest a good printer that could be used for this?

all correspondence and suggestions are very welcome, as a sort of prize, the genius, or group of genii (is that the plural?) will recieve the first copies of whatever zine i produce by this method.

thanks!

ben

 

[Nifty]

Ben, I wish I had an answer for you, and hope someone will have some suggestions, but I will be subscribed to this thread to see what others have to say! Very interesting idea!

 

[qwertydude]

I would be tough to get the right consistency and from batch to batch it may even change. On top of that the hp black cartridge is a pigment black, you'd need to use a pigment ink to get the correct results, I find putting dye black ink in my hp carts means a loss in print sharpness probably due to the dye ink jetting out differently in the nozzles due to different chemical properties. Also if you're hoping for a sort of multi-pass print I have tried that on my canon and the accuracy though pretty good produces noticeable blurring due to the paper not lining up, not to the point that it's obvious it's a two pass print, but it certainly reminds me when the color is not exactly aligned in a newspaper. It may take as much ink experimenting as it would have to just buy a good printer and refill it. I would say scrap that printer and get an Epson with individual colors, then switch it to dye ink, the artisan series I believe use dye ink to begin with so it would also be a good choice. Epson would be good because their piezo heads are much more durable that canon heads, this way if you still want to do ink experiments you don't have to worry about burning printheads out if ink doesn't flow.